End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

Angus Deaton recently used these statistics to discover a highly troubling trend in this measure of well-being. They found that life expectancy at birth for white Americans fell by one-tenth of a year between 2013 and 2014. In the next three years, life expectancy fell for the US population as a whole. Mortality at all ages rose, but the most rapid increase happened to white Americans in midlife. “Any decline in life expectancy is extremely uncommon. With a three-year decline, we are in unfamiliar territory; American life expectancy has never fallen for three years in a row since states’ vital registration coverage was completed in 1933,” Case and Deaton write.[17] The decline in the life expectancy of Americans began several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic delivered a major punch. By 2020, life expectancy at birth lost 1.6 years, as compared to 2014.[18]

In other words, we aren’t imagining it—in very important ways, things are worse in America. The problem is, our government is so dysfunctional that it cannot address the loss of lifespan because there’s short term power and gain to be had by denying climate change and the associated rise of diseases, and railing against wearing masks while long Covid destroys people.